


Whom One Loves

by theoldgods



Category: AUSTEN Jane - Works, Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Brotherly Affection, Developing Friendships, Drinking, First Meetings, Kissing, Lightly Implied Period-Typical Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Matchmaking, Pre-Canon, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-17 18:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5881807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he meets Mr. Charles Bingley, Darcy assumes he's being propositioned as a husband for either Caroline or Louisa. What he gets instead is a man whose care for family rivals Darcy's own—and whose personal warmth is a comfort and delight to Darcy in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whom One Loves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosied](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosied/gifts).



> I've reviewed many times for Brit terms and for Austenian language; please excuse any slips that remain (and feel free to point out any issues along those lines in the comments). Physical appearances are mostly based on a mash of the 1995 and 2005 adaptations, since (as far as I can tell) they are in short supply in the novel itself.
> 
> Happy Valentine's Day to all!
> 
> (Feel free to contact or follow me on [my tumblr](http://theoldgods.tumblr.com) for more P&P and Austen content if you so wish.)

****His hair was gold, as tousled as the hay Georgiana had pelted Darcy with when she was still a babe, and touched through with a red so delicate as to be nearly pink. He bowed his greeting to Darcy, smiling as Darcy returned the gesture.

“Charles Bingley, and a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Darcy.”

Darcy scrutinized his face, noting the guileless blue of his eyes and the milky tenor of his skin. “Likewise.”

Bingley introduced him to his sisters, newly out and with hair as dark as Darcy’s own, and it became apparent that Darcy was expected to take one of them around the room, no matter how stiff his feet felt in his new pair of shoes. His legs did not know the steps with any great grace, but Miss Caroline Bingley was all smiles as they joined the next dance, her voice cool and fluttery like bird’s wings and as unceasing as any Derbyshire stream.

Darcy answered her questions as briefly as he knew how and felt little but resentment.

After the ball had ended, and the Misses Bingley had joined a pair of friends in hailing their rides, Darcy was face to face with Bingley again, all large eyes, rosy cheeks, and a smile as wide as his sister’s, though twice as warm.

“And would you care for a drink this evening, Mr. Darcy?”

“I know of no fit place for drinking nearby, I am afraid.”

“Oh, to hear it told, we are none of us fit like Pemberley.” Before Darcy could respond, Bingley continued, his eyes twinkling in the dark, “Nonetheless it would be a great honor for me to host you for an hour, should you be willing.”

 _He wants me for his sister_ , Darcy knew at once. To sit in a drawing room with some bitter drink, while Miss Caroline pretended not to make eyes at him over the edge of a book or a hand of cards, was not what he had planned for his spare time outside of the inexorable march of London sociality.

He nonetheless followed Bingley and his sisters into their carriage as it pulled up alongside the kerb, much to Miss Caroline’s delight, whose conversation as they crossed the city was thankfully diverted by Bingley himself, asking Miss Louisa after that evening’s partner. To Darcy’s further surprise, the sisters scattered for bed as soon as they arrived at the Bingley residence, dropping the men curtseys before they disappeared upstairs.

“My sisters are very much present, some might say overly so,” Bingley remarked as he showed Darcy into the drawing room, “but fiercely accomplished nonetheless. Louisa in particular has a good heart, and she is not so sharp as Caroline, though men tell me also not so handsome.”

“You have come to the wrong man if you seek a husband for either of them.” Darcy accepted a tumbler from Bingley and ran a finger around its rim before stopping himself. “To be sure, they seem capable women—”

“Ah!” Bingley’s hand shook around his own glass. “Mr. Darcy, I do apologize, I meant no offense. Nor to interrupt you.” His fist briefly clenched, as did his face, closing up on itself in a movement that startled Darcy, who found himself wishing the smile back to Bingley’s face. Before he could rectify the awkwardness, Bingley had spoken again. “Yes, they are both seeking husbands. I did not mean to proposition you for their hands. I could not be so forward, not to a son of Pemberley. Forgive me if it seemed as such.”

“I know of nothing to forgive,” Darcy answered, for it was true. He looked closer at Bingley’s reddened cheeks, the wideness of his mouth even when closed in something akin to a frown, and was struck for the first time that evening of the youth of his new acquaintance. “Should it be impertinent, I apologize, but are they your wards?”

“Our father died before he could make anything permanent of us in the city. We have come seeking our futures.” Bingley’s smile was distant, yet as honest as each other look Darcy had seen upon his face that night. “I am only yet nine and ten, Mr. Darcy, and still new to the matter of matchmaking. Would it not be improper, I should let my sisters make their own matches themselves—they know more of how to do it, for a certainty.”

Darcy had a moment’s thought of Georgiana in such a drawing room, shyly glancing at men over the top of her own book, and felt something lurch in his throat.

“My sister is yet too shy and too young for that, and I am thankful.” He took a sip of his drink and found it, to his surprise, rather warmer and smoother than he had dared hope. “I do not envy you, Mr. Bingley. I hope each time I look at her that my Georgiana shall not be a young woman yet, but she grows ever more womanly each time we meet. And I still in my mind see her begging our mother for pianoforte lessons when she could scarce walk and talk.”

“I had heard you also were now head of house, if you forgive the gossip my ears know despite my wishing otherwise.” Darcy covered his smile behind his tumbler as Bingley spoke. “I know not yet how to be the perfect gentleman in such a city as this, so full of delights and horrors, nor how to rule my sisters as our father ruled us before.”

“Nor I.” At Bingley’s raised eyebrows, Darcy continued, his voice struggling against a laugh despite himself, “Nor I! You are only nine and ten, and I am scarce five and twenty, and it is not so much more gentlemanly an age, I confess, not when one has such a fine father to follow. And how does one find a husband for a sister whom one loves? I should think it easier to find a match for a woman one despises.”

Bingley sighed and shifted. “It would be easier if I did not care a whit for their happiness, only for what is the best for us all. And yet they have always been kind to me, in their ways, and I do not wish them anything but the respect they deserve.”

Bingley’s hair spilled gold and red across the back of his chair, his limbs lolling more openly than was proper for a gentleman and yet so warmly as to bring a smile to Darcy’s face and a queer heat to his stomach and the base of his spine. Darcy took another sip of his drink and asked, however impertinently, after the memory of Bingley’s mother, and answered, more honestly than he had believed possible, when Bingley turned the question back on him.

* * *

Darcy was the first person Bingley told, not long after suppertime, when Louisa’s engagement to Mr. Hurst was finalized. Darcy broke off writing his latest to Georgiana to hear the news, that Louisa had accepted Hurst’s offer, that she had not stopped smiling all afternoon.

“And you, a man of twenty years, making your sister happy in the end!” Darcy clasped Bingley’s shoulder, a touch that made them both shift happily within their skins. “Well done, my friend.”

Bingley’s smile was drunken, though he smelled not at all of alcohol. “I am so relieved I could cry, Darcy, would it not send my father’s shade into an awful state.”

“With his daughter settled, I am certain he would look away content.”

Bingley shook his head minutely, looked into Darcy’s eyes with his own overbright ones. “I must thank you as well, for having the sense to see that Hurst would not be so ill despite his relative penury.” As Darcy laughed, he said, “Would you be so kind as to make Caroline’s match for us as well? In the year I have known you, you have brought only good fortune to the Bingley family’s romantic prospects.”

“Ah, Bingley, do not make connections where there are none.” Darcy lifted a bottle of wine questioningly and, at Bingley’s nod, began to pour. “I have no magic touch with matchmaking, as well you know.”

“Were you not so stubborn, my good man, there should be a mistress of Pemberley in a moment’s notice.” Bingley accepted his glass with a decisive nod at his own pronouncement. “Shall I find you one?”

“Not again!” Darcy smiled over the rim of his own glass. “There is no hurry. Georgiana is not yet out, and I do not host at Pemberley anything like often enough for the place to need a mistress.”

“And your own happiness with such a wife?”

Darcy took a particularly large swallow of wine. “What of it?”

“What of it, he says, he who not three months ago told me not to mind Hurst’s lack of connections so long as Louisa would be well treated!” Bingley swung his leg companionably against Darcy’s, laughing at the heat Darcy could feel building in his cheeks. “Never you mind, then, if it makes you so red to contemplate. Find me a mistress instead.”

“A mistress for a nonexistent estate?” Darcy prodded Bingley back with his shoe, ignoring the turn of his stomach at the idea. “I shall have to find you an estate first, and my tastes are too spoiled by Pemberley to be of any use to another man.”

“No estate, no mistress. I shall be unattached forever, if I leave my future to your planning.” Bingley’s lips pouted so dramatically that Darcy had to laugh, smothering the sound against his arm. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to let me live on the grounds of Pemberley. I should be a very conscientious tenant.”

Darcy set his wineglass down on the table between their chairs, rubbing a palm against his breeches. “I should give you anything at all you desire, were it within my means.” He watched the sobriety creeping through Bingley’s face again as the words registered. “Your happiness means more to me than that of almost anyone else I know. Were it possible, I should find you the best, most suitable wife in all of England, one who loved you as fiercely as I should imagine you would love her, and give you a place twice as lovely as Pemberley for your own. You should never be my tenant; you should be my equal in all things.”

“Ah, Darcy,” Bingley murmured, leaning back in his chair. Darcy was reminded suddenly and most vividly of the night they met, the handsome, earnest casualness with which Bingley bared himself to a proud and rich stranger, and felt the same shock of pleased heat in his abdomen. “Were that the way the world worked, we should all of us be in perfect happiness.” His smile became brittle, touched through with a moroseness Darcy rarely saw on Bingley’s face. “I could never ask for a Pemberley. I have already asked you too much.” Over Darcy’s noise of protest he said, “You have given me and mine far better than any estate or wife; you have given us the value and constancy of your friendship and advice, and tonight we have seen but the first fruits of that.”

Bingley’s touch against the back of Darcy’s hand was startling in the pure contented rush it sent down Darcy’s spine. Darcy looked up to meet his blue eyes, so very preternaturally close in the haze of wine settling across them both, and gripped back until their fingers were nearly interlaced.

“Thank you, friend.”

Bingley’s voice echoed directly in Darcy’s ears, almost as if Bingley were speaking from within his own mind, or at least from some point very like to it. Darcy leaned in to whisper back.

“Thank _you_.” Sweat was forming on his brow. “You have done so very much for me, Bingley, to improve my mind and even, dare I say, bits of my heart and soul. I am a better man for having known you even just this one year thus far, and I look forward to the years to come, that they may bring us and ours the best of fortune.”

Their foreheads touched, and Darcy bit down on his tongue at the spark he felt at that additional contact. Bingley’s spare hand brushed Darcy’s chin, and he closed his eyes lest they betray the untoward crackle, the pulse so horrifically akin to lust, that he felt in addition to a more fraternal affection.

“Darcy.”

Part query, part command, all wrapped in Bingley’s voice, his light, gay earnestness that was never less than genuine. Darcy grunted a response.

“Darcy, my man.” Bingley’s fingers walked along Darcy’s cheeks as a wobble entered his voice. “Will you not smile for me, tonight? For Louisa?”

Darcy felt his mouth breaking open, beyond his command of his own faculties, the smile Bingley could coax so freely from his lips.

“For both our families,” Darcy whispered, and opened his eyes.

Bingley was too close to be within focus. All Darcy could see was the mottled red and white of his skin, the pure ivory—never anything so foolish as milk; how had Darcy ever thought that any part of Bingley was merely milk?—and rose, emanating tendrils of heat onto Darcy’s own face.

“Thank you.” One of Bingley's fingers hovered, trembling almost indiscernibly, over Darcy’s upper lip.

“And for us.”

Darcy leaned in and kissed the finger. For a moment neither man moved; Darcy felt his breath burning in his lungs, his heart spinning between his stomach and his throat. Then Bingley’s lips were on his, softer and warmer than he could ever have imagined, and he closed his eyes again to stay the film of tears that had formed.

When they broke apart, some minute or so later, Darcy’s body had gone blissfully limp with content. Across from him, Bingley was vibrating, dabbing his eye with his sleeve. Darcy offered him a kerchief, and they sat in smiling silence until Bingley had gathered himself once more.

“I must apologize,” Bingley said eventually into the stillness around them. “But will you forgive me if I say I cannot yet bring myself to do so?”

Darcy’s laugh was rather more wet than he would normally have shown to another. “I shouldn’t forgive you if you did apologize, Charles.”

Bingley squeezed his hand in wordless acknowledgment. They sat for another minute before Bingley got to his feet.

“I should be happy to have you as my friend for all my days, Fitzwilliam Darcy. I hope our families, wherever our sisters go, will ever be as dear to one another as you are become to me.”

Darcy wished then, as he had not wished in years, for more moments, more stolen pieces of time that very night to simply _be_ with another soul. He settled for escorting Bingley to the door and clasping his shoulder as he stood on the precipice of the outer world, looking back at Darcy with the most exquisitely wrought happiness on his face, until Darcy felt the same blooming on his own features.

“We shall see each other soon, my dearest Bingley. I bid you the best of nights.”

“And I you, my dear friend.”

He left Darcy smiling at nothing for the rest of the evening.


End file.
